dw_suggestions | Site-specific reply option for sites you auto-crosspost to

Entry tags:

Site-specific reply option for sites you auto-crosspost to

Title:
Site-specific reply option for sites you auto-crosspost to

Area:
comments

Summary:
As well as "anon", "OpenID" and "DW user", add a comment option specific to any site you automatically crosspost to, as commenters will be coming from there.

Description:
I posted the full rant on my DW: http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/30773.html Update: More detailed user experience reports from frustrated LJ posters on that post.

I have recently set my DW to crosspost to LiveJournal and direct all comments back here. However, it seems that in practice, DreamWidth's OpenID login for LiveJournal users is crappy, annoying and frequently just doesn't work for non-technical users. I'm seeking more info for a proper bug report. But basically, the OpenID comment option has confused non-geeks to the point where they can't work it after ages trying.

The thing about the LiveJournal engine is it's ridiculously easy to use. People who can't work computers can participate with huge success, and geeks don't get annoyed. A successful interface has to work for geeks and anti-geeks.

The OpenID requirement as presently implemented is a Linux c.1998 style solution: tell the user to hand-dig a latrine, then hand them a toilet seat to prop on top, and honestly think you've done something for user-friendliness.

The obvious provider-neutral solution: if someone is automatically crossposting to another site, people will be coming from there — so include said sites as express options for commenting. A box something like "LiveJourna(tm) user: [_______] LiveJournal will confirm your identity." Accept a username, a username with hyphens, a URL, anything unambiguous. IT HAS TO BE RIDICULOUSLY EASY.

This is actually breaking my social network in practice. Inadvertent lockin is just as bad in its effects as deliberate lockin.

Poll #2450 Site-specific reply option for sites you auto-crosspost to

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 40

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
14 (35.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
9 (22.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
7 (17.5%)

(I have no opinion)
9 (22.5%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.5%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've been looking at the whole OpenID thing vaguely squinty-eyed for a while, since while we've done a great deal to improve upon LJ's implementation thereof, it's still not anywhere near what I'd consider easily usable. We have this suggestion for integrating the concepts of OpenID login and "named anonymous"/pseudonymous commenting level (ie, you give the system a name and a URL to identify yourself as), which I think will be a step forward, but I let this suggestion through despite the similarity because of what I view as the key difference here, namely changing the various login/identification options in a context-sensitive manner on an account-by-account basis depending on the crosspost settings.

Generally speaking, though, we're ideologically against doing things that refer to one specific other service (such as, but not limited to, LJ) -- solutions should be generalizable for any external site as much as possible. One thing I've seen elsewhere on the OpenID-speaking internet that I really like as a solution is some sort of box/dropdown/display/etc that shows the icons and/or names of popular OpenID-enabled services, as a "enter your username for thus-and-such service here", and the system then constructs the OpenID URL for you behind the scenes.

The thing I'd be concerned about with your suggestion exactly as it's presented is that we already have people who expect to be able to log onto DW with their LJ username and password (and get very irate when they can't) -- it's a very common problem among LJ clonesites/DW-based code forks, and a major source of confusion and anger. As presented, I think your suggestion would increase that confusion instead of making it better, so I'd be more inclined to go for something like in the other suggestion I linked: an "enter your website/journal URL" field, which the system then queries to see if it's OpenID enabled. If it is, it treats the comment/commenter as an OpenID login attempt; if not, it defaults to the (not yet added, but On The List) pseudonymous comment option.

I like this better.

Do you think it would be feasible to throw in something to detect the referer, and, if from a different site, autofill the url field from that? It wouldn't work all the time, of course, but it might help eliminate that step when it's a visitor who followed a link from another service to a particular entry. And, bonus, the autofill could be counted on to form the url properly.

I can't really think of a way that wouldn't have too many false positives -- referer data is notoriously unreliable. And besides, going by the Google Analytics data for my account, more people would be coming from your-username.livejournal.com/12345.html than would be coming from their-username.livejournal.com/friends -- from my stats, it appears that more people open up the crossposted entry in a tab, read it on LJ, then click through to comment, rather than opening up the DW version in a tab from their reading page and commenting there.

Well, yes, but "livejournal.com" would still be the service they came from. That's the part I meant, not the user--just the site/service.

But to authenticate with open id, you need the user name. My open-id identifier is kyrielle.dreamwidth.org or kyrielle.livejournal.org - without knowing my login, there's no way to get to it.

*faintly exasperated* I am making this suggestion in the context of the foregoing discussions of changing how the OpenID fields are presented. They can fill in their username. What I am suggesting is merely a small time-saving aid by letting the service field autopopulate. If this is going to feature anything like a dropdown of common OpenID enabled services then the form itself will have to have separate fields for service and username, which will be combined in the backend before sending.

I think that will save a whole lot of confusion among those who are unfamiliar with OpenID, too.

Ah! Gotcha. I hadn't understood that; my apologies. That seems like it would be nice.

a dropdown box of known openID services sounds far more usable, and far less limited to specific services. I like it (though I've found that once openID is explained clearly, with examples, it's not very hard to use at all).

This would need an option for "other" so that not-well-known OpenID services could be used also. But agreed, this is a good idea.

Right, or people who're using OpenID from their own sites, or whatever.

Yes, a multi-site dropdown seems like a much better idea to me. (Maybe also, before the pop up, a slightly less geeky definition of OpenID than identity URL, like "a web address you own"?

I think a multi-site dropdown might cause people's eyes to glaze over, unless they already have some idea of exactly which site that they're looking for. And if they do, why not just let them copy-and-paste the URL? If it's OpenID-enabled, we can authenticate it; if not, we can at least give them a free link back to their homepage. (And maybe take the opportunity to educate them with a statement like "You're posting anonymously because we couldn't verify your identify. Learn more about OpenID!" with a link.

Or something like that. >.>

Except that we really explicitly do not want to provide people with the ability to just drop off a link and have it be posted: that way lies serious spam!

This is true ... at the same time, though, if the user has anonymous commenting enabled, there's nothing to stop him or her from just dropping links in the body text. (Or is there?)

Hey ... what if the website field had some kinda AJAX-y thing where it auto-detected if the URL was to an OpenID-enabled site after you'd typed it in, and then let you know immediately afterwards if it'd work? This would especially help for if anonymous commenting was disabled; you'd type in your website, and if that didn't work you'd read the error message and maybe scan over a list of sites that would work, before deciding on one to enter.

Anonymous commenters can't post links, they can only post urls as text. (http://www.example.org/)

As for only showing the chooser after someone put a website in…I don't think that reflects best/current practice of what websites are currently doing. Unless we have a way that is clearly better than the default, I think we should stick with what's common, because it is likely to be familiar.

The problem with having a blank website field still leaves the issue of, how do we communicate what to put in the blank?

Anonymous commenters can't post links, they can only post urls as text. (http://www.example.org/)

Maybe have their website listed just as a text URL then, unless it's an OpenID? They could be listed as "So-and-so from http://example.com", instead of

feathertail or feathertail.livejournal.com plus a favicon.

The problem with having a blank website field still leaves the issue of, how do we communicate what to put in the blank?

I think the problem is communicating that we want anything more than just any old website. Blogger actually does this the best, I think, but their selection thing favors certain websites over others ... and a more comprehensive selection grid would a) look like NASCAR (as Matt Mullenweg put it) and b) inevitably leave tons of sites out.

My website actually uses a sort of AJAX-y thing, thanks to the WordPress OpenID plugin ... click here to take a look, if you'd like. What happens is after you've entered your website and tabbed down into the main body area, a checkbox appears that says "Authenticate your comment using OpenID." I think that's not very clear, and would like to change it to something like

Verify that you are USERNAME at EXAMPLE.COM (you must be logged in there)

Applying this idea to Dreamwidth, we could say that then if it bounces it goes ahead and posts the comment anyway if anonymous commenting is enabled, and has a bolded reminder something like

Unable to verify that you are USERNAME at EXAMPLE.COM. Your comment was posted anonymously. Check to see if you are logged in; if not, EXAMPLE.COM may not support OpenID authentication. Click here to see a list of sites that do!

And if anonymous commenting is disabled, just remove the "Your comment was posted anonymously" bit.

I admit, this isn't how most websites that implement OpenID do it. The thing is, though, how many of them actually get people to comment using OpenID? And of those, how many people are using their "primary" websites, even if they may be OpenID-enabled, as opposed to a secondary site that was displayed more prominently like MySpace? By just asking for a personal URL, instead of presenting a NASCAR vehicle's worth of options, we make it more likely that they'll enter the URL to the website that they call home. Then after they comment, we can educate them about OpenID and how it either made their authenticated comment possible or its lack made it impossible.

Verify that you are USERNAME at EXAMPLE.COM (you must be logged in there)

This seems like it would be more clear...

Is there a "What's OpenID?" help-link anywhere for all that?

I'd say that for that example there might be a "How?" link that would explain that it uses OpenID. And then after it's completed there might be another link like "Learn more," or something.

The idea I have in mind is that OpenID should not be a "brand name" so much as something to take for granted. The first prompt would set up the expectation in people's minds that they can use their account from another website (which they should be able to), and then the second would be a quick teaching moment to explain either how it happened or how it didn't.

The impression they should walk away with, I think, is not being confused by techie terminology but either being impressed ("Hey, I didn't know you could do that!") or annoyed with their home website ("How come they don't use this when all these websites do?")

Um, it seems to have automatically turned my example.com thing into a hyperlink. I guess it does that if you're not posting anonymously, so that was a bad example.

Have you commented at a Blogger site? Did it work for you? I found Blogger's drop-down to work very nicely for me. Granted, I'm a geek so I could happily type the address if I had to as well - but the drop-down and overall interface seemed pretty clear. If you try to list every possible service it might not be, but listing the ones that are most common seems to work pretty well.

Edited to *facepalm*. Just read downthread, and yes you have. Honestly, I really like the Blogger implementation, since it lets you specify but lists the main sites...but it sounds like you don't. Sorry I didn't read the later comments first!

Edited (Reading the whole thread is a Good Thing) 2010-03-16 13:35 (UTC)

Is okay! (^.^)b

I actually like Blogger's, because it's the best thing I've seen so far for OpenID-ness. I'm just not sure it's sustainable, because it's not provider-agnostic and will inevitably favor some services over others; LiveJournal has an icon on the list and (IIRC) if I comment with LiveJournal I get an LJ favicon, but with Dreamwidth I just get an OpenID one. And I have to know ahead of time that Dreamwidth is "an OpenID provider."

Whereas if Blogger used the system that I described in the comments below, I'd just list my Dreamwidth journal as my home website, and then it'd authenticate it using OpenID and would let me know that it'd done so. I'd feel rewarded for having chosen Dreamwidth as my online home, and this "OpenID" thing that it'd just introduced me to would strike me as kinda cool. Because I'd know exactly what it had done, and I'd like that it'd done it.

Yes, I like the idea of "enter your username for such-and-such a service" better than "if you're using LiveJournal, go here, otherwise, here's your other options"

I like both of these. When I comment at Blogger sites, it's really nice to be able to choose open id, then smack LJ in the drop down, and not have to type my full URL but just the user id. That's just lazy-geek, but it's still nice. They display the little representations of all the specially-handled sites next to open id, too (LJ pencil, etc.) as a cue that you might want to tick the radio button.

It's understandable that you're against per-site specialisation. Hence my suggestion that an option pop up for that site when already crossposting to it. In which case it's clearly special in the poster's network already.

This comment gives an example of what casual LJ commenters do when confronted with "OpenID" (which sounds like someone selling them something) and "identity URL" (what the what?)

Solutions should be generalisable, which the OpenID plumbing is. However, exposing the naked plumbing is failing to work for the people it's supposed to, i.e. the remote commenters.

Whatever suggestion you go with - please, please do usability testing with non-geeks. It's painfully clear that no-one did such testing with the present option for LJ-based commenters.

Whatever suggestion you go with - please, please do usability testing with non-geeks. It's painfully clear that no-one did such testing with the present option for LJ-based commenters.

Just for the record, you'd happen to be 100% wrong there, and that is precisely why there are bugs open to improve on the implementation. Which, I think bears repeating, was forked from LJ.

And just seconding another commenter elsewhere in this discussion: while I'm trying very hard to listen through the DW-vitriol for the good and useful parts of your suggestion, it would be a heck of a lot easier to do if you'd turn the aggression down by a factor of about 300%.

as the author of the anonymous comment I'm happy to assist in any way I can.

I would be more keen on this if you'd phrased it in less antagonistic language. The LiveJournal engine is not ridiculously easy to use, and frequently annoys geeks. The Dreamwidth OpenID login for LiveJournal users is significantly better than the LJ OpenID login for DW users.

However, improving the OpenID implementation is still a good thing, and I'd support your actual suggestion being implemented.

I also think that improving the error message described in http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/30773.html?thread=70965#cmt70965 to give an LJ example including underscores would be a help. I think there's another bug already open to make it guess sensibly for people with underscores in their usernames, which will also help.

Agreed ... LJcode could use some simplification. There's a reason that Tumblr's taking off. (Not that we want to be Tumblr, mind ... )

It would be nice if we could detect that people are logged into other sites.

denise seems to be saying that there'd be a lot of false positives though ... and even if we could detect if people were logged in on one site, what if they'd rather use a different OpenID to authenticate? Like if they're reading somebody's LiveJournal and click through to comment on Dreamwidth, but they'd like to use their WordPress OpenID.

The LiveJournal engine is not ridiculously easy to use, and frequently annoys geeks.

This.

From the OP: The thing about the LiveJournal engine is it's ridiculously easy to use. People who can't work computers can participate with huge success, and geeks don't get annoyed.

Both of these statements are not true for everyone in those groups.

I also think that improving the error message described in http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/30773.html?thread=70965#cmt70965 to give an LJ example including underscores would be a help. I think there's another bug already open to make it guess sensibly for people with underscores in their usernames, which will also help

This is all that is required IMO. A simple example or examples of how to log in using OpenID will satisfy 90% of those people attempting to use it.

Personally, I think what would be best is if the journal owner had the ability to customize their commenting options. Some users might want the default, others might want buttons for whatever site they like to crosspost to.

That would be thoroughly excellent.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Site-specific reply option for sites you auto-crosspost to

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